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AMD Phenom II Overclocked To 6.5GHz
An anonymous reader writes "During CES a group of overclockers with access to liquid nitrogen and liquid helium for the extra boost of coldness cooled an AMD Phenom II X4 chip to -232 degrees Celsius. Once they got the chip cooled to this frigid temperature, they pushed the clock speed all the way up to 6.5GHz, which is a world record for a quad-core CPU, and then dished out an astonishing 45,474 3DMark05 score!"
.. to get a decent score in 3DMark ..
Numbers must be really crunchy at that temperature
which is a world record for a quad core CPU and they dished out and astonishing 45,474 3DMark05 score! Watch the video below to see how it was done and how history was made:
Truly PHENOMenal, but I can't help but (cynically, I admit) think about how history inevitably mocks overclockers. Cue back to the 90s and a headline might have read "486 overclocked to 500Mhz -- history has been made!". Like Ozymandias, nothing beside remains...
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Yeah, only 6.5GHz too.
Call me when it goes up to 11
whoo! and i _still_ get the first post with my q6600!
Can you run FSX and Cryis at 60FPS?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I'm not sure if it's quite -232 Celsius in my apartment but it's pretty close. They probably could have achieved 6.0GHz overclocking using an air-cooled system in my living room alone.
Don't we already have CPUs running at 3GHz?
I was there, too. The coolest it got was approximately -242 degrees C; the warmest was approximately -218 degreesC, at least while I was watching.
The party was the XtremeSystems.org party at its LV headquarters, and it was sponsored primarily by AMD, DFI, Gigabyte, Cooler Master, and Thermaltake. It seems to me that Commodore had a presence there, too.
See ThinkComputers' blog for some more pictures (disclosure: my article).
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Your Windows EULA prohibits operation in such an environment.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
How reliable is that thing?
An slightly overclocked Core i7 965 (Extreme Edition) in a similar rig (in terms of video cards, etc) scored about 26,000 in the same benchmark (3DMark05).
So, no, they didn't have to go to liquid helium to be competetive, but going to liquid helium did allow them to set a world record (although I don't see any Guiness Book or other "official" information about this).
...with my lightning-fast 486!!!
at the time a 486 might have been overclocked to 500 mhz, it would have been a great deal. more precisely, at the time anything has been overclocked to phenomenonal mhz, it has been a great deal AT THAT TIME.
Read radical news here
AMD doesn't make any $1200 chips.
Like it or not, that's just not the market they're in. They're doing well at the $200 level, though.
I'm not particularly concerned that there's little competition in the segment I'd never pay for anyway. I mean, it's nice that there are Maybach Mercedes and McLaren F1's, but that doesn't mean I'm worried about competetiveness in the segment.
Whereas I'd be worried if there was only one mid-priced performance sedan, especially if it was sub-expectations in some way.
I don't think AMD is ashamed to have set a record with a $235 chip, in a world previously dominated by $1000+ chips.
I know I once bought a specific CPU because I knew it would be good for overclocking. It wasn't a bad idea -- a 1.8 ghz CPU that I could get running at 2.4, at perhaps half or a third the price of a similar CPU at 2.4 ghz, and I'd overclock my RAM, also.
I learned two things:
First, you really have to know your stuff. The RAM I had wouldn't overclock very well, and RAM which would cost a bit more. I had the BIOS helping me out, and I still had to fiddle with timings and voltages.
And second, despite all the stress testing I did, it would still occasionally crash. I never tracked down these crashes until I clocked it back to spec. Once I got a job, I decided that shelling out another hundred dollars or so for a faster CPU was a better use of my time than trying to overclock one, and dealing with the instability once I did.
Now, that's probably a completely different area than overclocking to 6.5 ghz, but if I really needed that, I imagine it would be much more cost-effective to buy two or three of them. It won't really help rasterized games (that'd be video-card bound), and raytraced games should scale to multiple machines.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It really depends on the type of substances used, usually an alloy with the correct proportions, but I doubt they would stumble upon a superconducting combination on the chip. (Not that it would matter anyways, since the speed limitation is caused by the switching speed of the transistors).
No x86s in this space. IBM has POWER6 running at 5 GHz.
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yes, yes we do.
i cant tell but is there an incredibly large whoosh goin over my head? (or just your head?). 6.5Ghz is faster than 3. And in other news six is afraid of 7, because 7, 8, 9
what would happen if you cool down a CPU to temperatures where the CPU becomes super conductive? ;)
Or it that even possible with doped/diffused Si? Would it still work as a semiconductor?
Would it give you even better benchmarks? Did someone already try?
Someone should...
I don't know what weird kind of units you are using in your part of the world. But the rest of the planet is using Celsius for everyday temperature measures and Kelvin for scientific measures (same step size, different zero).
And on our scale, absolute zero (0K) is -273C.
Thus -242C (aka 31K) is pretty legal and possible temperature. (Although maybe not a very common one outside university labs and mad overclocker's basements)
Now please stop using Réaumur scale and start using what everybody else is using around.
--
PS: I checked, -242Ré is indeed impossible on Réaumur scale - 0 K is -218Ré
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
During CES a group of overclocker's
a group of overclocker's what exactly? Is it just me or is the correct use of apostrophe's [sic] starting to become a lost art these days?
What I think is really amazing about this is that at a clock speed of 6.5 GHz, each cycle takes around 15 nanoseconds (15 * 10^-9 seconds) to complete. In this time frame light can only travel around 5 cm. Electrical signals travel close to this speed themselves, so the limit of clock speeds is being reached, since the chip itself is on this same order of distance. It is around the point where one side of the chip will not be able to communicate with the other side in a single clock cycle.
(a) Some people just enjoy this sort of thing. I don't really pay attention to who is the fastest at driving a car around a track, but some other people do. So, one answer to your question: maybe it's not exciting at all, to you, and no one says it must be.
(b) Epic overclocks like this presage the chips to come. While I won't be using anything but stock air coolers in my own computers, I'm happy to know that the Phenom II overclocks this well, because that means there is headroom in the design and that AMD will be able to get the clock rate up over the next year or two. So, maybe it's not exciting, but it is interesting to know that the Phenom II isn't a chip that can just barely support its official clock.
I'm highly surprised and intrigued the chip even worked at -242C (31K!) for a long time it was speculated in overclocking circles that weird things would happen to current silicon much below the temperature of liquid nitrogen. It does seem liquid helium has been tried a few times but this is the lowest reported temperature I have ever seen on a overclocked CPU. It might not mean much for people who don't care about overclocking but I think this is a significant achievement.
I'm also intrigued by the possibility this chip could have gone faster, it may have become bound by motherboard reference clock and multipliers at this speed. It's not uncommon for the motherboards ability to deliver current to become the limiting factor.
8ghz is reportedly the outright world record http://www.nordichardware.com/news,5505.html Although I think this was reset to 8.2ghz not long after.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Deep space may be cold, but vacuum is a superb insulator. The chips can't be pushed hard without extensive and expensive heat sinks. Considerations on deep space probes are reliability and low power consumption, and there isn't a lot of need for speed. Reliability, radiation hardness, and low power consumption all have requirements that oppose speed.
Furthermore, since space probes take a long time to develop and use only very well established technology, they are using nearly-obsolete semiconductors by the time they're launched. They're really old when they get where they're going. It's not fast stuff by today's standards.
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I generally don't let these types of things affect the CPU I use for work. I have found that in order for a system to be fast, all components much be equally matched. When the CPU is overclocked by a factor of 2, and the memory is not, the amount of time spent waiting on memory will increase significantly. If a designer knew the chip would be run at the higher speed, more cache would generally be included to make up for the disparity between CPU speed and memory speed. A good rule for buying new systems is to upgrade in two halves. I generally buy motherboard, RAM, CPU, and power supply at the same time for compatibility reasons. A year or two later, I will update my storage and video card. I buy a motherboard that supports the fastest memory made, I buy a lot of memory, and I buy a CPU that is at a point on the price to performance curve where spending more doesn't yield much more performance. In a year or two when software starts to actually use this capacity, Ill upgrade storage and video for a bit of a boast. Unfortunately, faster hard drives only make a bit of difference.
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that it still only scored 4.7 on the Vista Performance Index...
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Wow.
People use liquid nitrogen to over clock a CPU, news at 11.
Well, really they used liquid helium. When you use liquid helium (which has a boiling point of about 4.2K at 1 atmosphere), you're using the liquid nitrogen (boiling point of 77K) just to keep the liquid Helium cold longer. Using liquid nitrogen is sort of boring - you can store it in an insulated jug for a good long while even, but using liquid helium is, well, pretty damned cool!
And in other news six is afraid of 7, because 7, 8, 9
Oh, that makes sense! I always thought 6 was just a big pussy.
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Strangely, the result states that the CPU was running at 4481 MHz.
I'm skeptical. Extreme overclocking requires copious amounts of dangerous coolants which are known to cause severe brain damage to the system's user. Side effects include: empty fridge, finding strangers sleeping in your tub and massive hangovers.
As of this afternoon, they /do/ make chips that expensive, and more:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16298
Their new top-of-the-line chip:
Opteron 8386 SE 8 sockets max 2.8GHz 105W $2,649
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'Unfortunately, faster hard drives only make a bit of difference.'
I suppose a 'faster' hard drive doesn't make a big difference compared with a 'fast' hard drive. But a fast hard drive compared with a slow hard drive makes a HUGE real world performance difference. Clunky and slow drives are the primary reason that laptops are so doggedly slow compared to desktops.
Of course 'speed' is defined by rpm's in this case, not throughput.
Yea, the poster must have gotten confused - they actually overclocked it to 6500+
Wah!